Registrar of Voters considers dumping equipment

Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich said this week she is considering dropping the Premier Elections Solutions software that dropped almost 200 votes from the county's final election results.

But, some say that Crnich's proposal that the county discard Premier's optical ballot scanning machines and GEMS vote-counting software in favor of those of another elections company, HART InterCivic, is simply trading one flawed system for another.

Meanwhile, the California Secretary of State's Office continues to look into the error in Premier's software that led to the mysteriously deleted votes -- an error that the company said it has known about since 2004.

Just days after the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors certified the November election results, the first-of-its-kind Humboldt County Election Transparency Project uncovered the fact that 197 vote-by-mail ballots, which had been scanned through vote-counting machines, were deleted without a trace from the final tally, at least as tabulated by Premier Elections Solutions GEMS software.

The missing votes would not have changed any of the election's outcomes, according to Crnich.

The programing problem has been traced to an error with a specific version of GEMS software that sometimes results in the first deck of ballots scanned through the vote-counting machine to vanish without a trace from the final results.

The error was caught by the transparency project, which passes every ballot cast in an election through an optical scanner after it's officially counted. Those images are then placed online, along with open-source software, created by Mitch Trachtenberg, that allows viewers to sort the ballots by precinct and scrutinize the vote as they see fit.

The week after the error was found, a Premier spokesman said the company had known of the software error for years, and had simply sent e-mails to its customers instructing how to "work around" the problem.

The company, however, did not notify the California Secretary of State's Office of the problem.

While elections offices in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara added the work-around instructions to their written Election Day procedures, then-Humboldt County Elections Manager Lindsey McWilliams did not, and failed to notify Crnich, his direct supervisor, or Kelly Sanders, his successor, of the problem.

Kate Folmar, press secretary for Secretary of State Debra Bowen, said Bowen believes that Premier should have notified her office when this software error first surfaced.

"Right now, the secretary of state is talking to the company, other elections officials and other experts," Folmar said. "Once Secretary Bowen is done gathering all the facts, she definitely plans on notifying the (federal) Elections Assistance Commission of her findings and the flaw in Premier's software. When that's done, she will determine what, if any, other action can be taken in California."

Crnich said she has already been contacted by the commission, which has requested a report from both her and Bowen's office on the problem.

North Coast Congressman Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, said he has also contacted some federal elections officials about the problem.

"The health of our democracy depends on the integrity of our elections process," Thompson said in a statement. "Our community should be extremely proud of the effort by local citizens and the county registrar, Carolyn Crnich, who put together this ground-breaking pilot project. The Humboldt County Election Transparency Project made sure that, in this county, every vote really does count.

"On a larger scale," Thompson continued. "I am very concerned that this software problem has existed for at least four years and the company has not taken adequate steps to assure the integrity of the system. I have written to federal elections officials to make sure they review the matter and take the steps necessary to ensure this type of error doesn't occur again."

While Crnich's announcement that she is proposing the county scrap Premier's software and ballot-scanning equipment in exchange for that of Hart InterCivic only came this week, she said it's not for the reasons many might think.

"This plan that is proposed pre-dates any of the problems that were found to exist in this election," Crnich said.

She said the move is simply intended to bring the county's whole system under one vendor. As is, the county uses some equipment from Premier and some from Hart InterCivic, which means the elections staff has to essentially operate two different systems, according to Crnich.

Under Crnich's proposal, the county would purchase 80 new eScan machines and new central vote-counting software for a total of approximately $600,000. Crnich said the funds would not come from county coffers, but instead would come from money set aside through the passage of Proposition 41 and the Help America Vote Act.

Crnich's proposal is tentatively slated to come up for approval by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors at its Jan. 6 meeting, after which it would go to Bowen's office for final authorization.

But some charge that Crnich's proposal simply swaps one untrustworthy system for another, and others are calling for a more public process to determine what the best course would be for the county's Elections Office.

"After Premier's GEMS system covertly deleted 197 ballots from the November 2008 election, my hope would be that Humboldt County could slowly and deliberately evaluate the various election technologies available," said election volunteer Parke Bostrom in an e-mail to the Times-Standard. "To rapidly abandon a previously trusted technology, only to quickly replace it with another secret, proprietary counting system, without allowing the public an opportunity to comment, seems to me the wrong course. Or, maybe, it is the right course, but it is being taken at the wrong speed."

For her part, Crnich said the public will have an opportunity to weigh in when the matter comes before the supervisors.

Dave Berman, co-founder of the Voter Confidence Committee and an outspoken critic of proprietary vote-counting technology, agreed with Bostrom, urging the county to court more public opinion before deciding how to proceed.

"I think it's a matter of process," Berman said. "If we're going to have a meaningful public exploration of the issues, I don't think that process should begin with the decision-maker already having made a decision."

The Board of Supervisors will have the final county say on the matter and, whatever is decided, many remain thankful that the county has the transparency project in place as a safety net.

Though the project, in its first general election, has already proven valuable, Folmar said it has yet to be endorsed by the Secretary of State's Office.

"Secretary Bowen has a long history of supporting transparency in government," Folmar said. "She would love to see the day when California elections can be run on fully developed open-source software once that technology is available and fully tested. But, Secretary Bowen has not fully endorsed any transparency project."